The text content of you site will load fast enough but the large images will take time to download on user’s computer. So its always a good idea to optimize you site with proper amount of images and texts so that your users are not annoyed by slow loading and also the site looks attractive to them. It is really a good approach if you can check each and every images you are going to use in your site and try to optimize them for faster loading. You can very easily remove the unnecessary information from your images using a good image editing software and effectively reduce the image file size without affecting the quality of the image.

For example, if you are using Adobe Photoshop, while saving your images as a JPEG file, it will ask you for the quality to save. Generally 8 to 10 is quite good for your purpose and it will not reduce the image quality that much. You will also get a smaller file size with this settings. However, if you don’t have Adobe Photoshop, you can search the internet for free image compressing software that can help you to reduce the image size.

Also you can try to save the images in PNG format which will give you the best quality with the lowest file size. Another good option is saving your images in GIF format. In GIF format, the color information that has not been used by your image will be removed and will make your file size low. However, saving in GIF may affect your image quality so PNG is the best option.

Once you have acquired the basics of blogging, you can start utilizing the power of blogging and use it for blog marketing. You can either choose your own products or can find a suitable niche to market. Always try to select something that is low in competition and also people are interested in. The most effective would be something related to your hobby or liking.

After selecting the blog topic you can start creating your blog. Start providing your visitors something useful so that they can get back to your blog again and again. This will keep you getting returning visitors and also increase your revenue. But you have to keep promoting your blog regularly to keep the traffic flowing.

Make sure you are updating your blog regularly and also providing something new to your visitors. If you are going to update your blog on daily basis, make sure you do that for a certain period of time. Because, if you skip a few days, the readers will lose concentration towards you blog and stop visiting. Keep the post flow on a regular basis so that readers are happy and get back to your blog again.

If you can manage everything properly and on a regular basis, you will be getting the success sign very fast. Blog marketing is effective and powerful as mentioned earlier but must be maintained properly.

CSS Group Selector

CSS group selector is a very useful practise that will minimize the coding and will help you to avoid repeating declarations.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family:arial;
margin:0.5em 0;
padding:0;

}

Centering Elements

Firefox and Safari makes it easier to center an element by just declaring the width and setting margin left and right to auto. But for IE, you have to specify text-aling to center in the parent element.

body {
text-align:center;  /* for ie   */
}

#container {
width:800px;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:left;
}

Text Transformation

You can very easily transform your text to lowercase, uppercase or capitalized the first character of the word using CSS.

h1 {
text-transform:uppercase;
}

h2 {
text-transform:capitalize;
}

p {
text-transform:lowercase;
}

Hidden Text

You may want to use hidden text to replace images but also want to make sure search engines can grab the keywords.

a {
text-indent:-999em;
outline:none;
background: url(button.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;
width:100px; height:50px;
display:block;
}

PNG Fix for IE6

PNG images may not show up as you wanted in IE6, so here is the hack you can use to solve the problem.

.png_hack {
background-image: url(../img/the_image.png) !important;
background-image: none;
filter: none !important;
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=’img/the_image.png’);
}

Setting Transparency Using CSS

Setting transparency using CSS is difficult to show on all browsers. However, here is the tricks to solve it.

.transparent_class {
filter: alpha(opacity=50);  /* ie  */
-moz-opacity: 0.5;            /* old mozilla browser like netscape  */
-khtml-opacity: 0.5;        /* for really really old safari */
opacity: 0.5;                /* css standard, currently it works in most modern browsers like firefox,  */
}

Nvu

Nvu is a very powerful open source WYSIWYG HTML editor which is really user friendly and flexible to use. Nvu supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It has some excellent features including:

• WYSIWYG file editor
• Multiple file editing tabs
• CSS editing support
• Integrated FTP feature
• Spell checker function

Download Here
HTML-Kit

HTML-Kit is another great HTML editor for windows. It supports HTML, XML and scripts authoring. Editing, formatting, validating, previewing and publishing the pages are much more easier than anything else with this excellent free tool.

• Local and remote files can be edited and saved easily
• Color coding support of almost all scripting languages such as HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, Perl, Java, Python, C/C++, Pascal
• Spell cheker integrated
• Preview on the fly
• Validation of documents for W3C’s HTML Tidy
• Automatic code corrections
• Context sesitive help system
• Quick preview on external browsers such as IE, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape

Download Here

Right now there are more than 14 million blogs around the internet and everyday 80K more blogs been added. The major factor is about 30% of the total internet users visits or reads the blogs everyday. If you can promote your products and services using a blog, you can very easily grab huge clients very fast. If you can properly write about your products and services, you will sure get huge attention from your potential clients.

Product and service promotion using blog posting also creates open communication with your clients and which will increase trust and loyalty also. If you can properly respond to their queries and get some good reviews, they will be willing to grab your product more easily. Another great opportunity about blogs are, you can get good feedback from your potential clients if you can properly communicate with them. This in turn will increase your sales without spending extra money for advertising.

In order to get good results, make sure you promote your blogs properly by submitting to major search engines and web directories, social bookmarking and blog commenting. Also make sure you update your blog posts so that returning visitors can get latest information about your products and services. Also remember, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds is a very important tool that you can bring you more benefits if you can use it properly.

You have to use the blogs just like a booth in a trade show where many visitors will be coming from different areas and queries. Make sure you can answer them all and provide something useful to them.

There are various ways you can utilize to get more traffic to your websites. Here are 25 easy ways that will help you grab more traffic to your site fast.

1. Join as many webmaster forums and post about your website. You can post on review sections of various forums and this will also increase your backlinks.

2. You can also do blog commenting to grab more good traffic and this is also good for getting backlinks. Always try to comment on blogs and posts related to your website niche.

3. You can advertise on search engines to get a good publicity for your website.

4. You can publish your articles on various free article directory for getting good traffic and backlinks.

5. Don’t forget to put your website title on your visiting cards, envelopes and letter heads etc.

6. Exchange links with websites similar to your niche. This is a very old method of getting traffic to websites but very much effective.

7. Don’t forget to add RSS feed to your website and get subscribers to increase returning visitors.

8. Add ‘Tell a friend’ or ‘Bookmark Us’ or ‘Set as Homepage’ script to your website.

9. Write press releases to gain popularity. You will find a lot of sources around the internet that will allow you to write free press releases.

10. Submit your websites to as many free web directories as you can. Also don’t forget to submit your site in popular web directories like DMOZ.

11. You can start a weekly contest to grab more visitors quick. A small prize for each contests will help you grab more attention to your contests and website as well.

12. Make an attractive video and submit to various video sharing sites like YouTube and others.

13. You can submit classified ads to various free classified advertising sites.

14. Try to include some free stuffs such as ebooks, graphics, free scripts etc. for your visitors so that they might find your site useful and visit again. They will also be telling their friends to visit your site and you will get free traffic easily.

15. You can put an advertisement in the local newspaper which will get more some good amount of traffic fast and easy. Its also a good way for long term traffic flow.

16. You can also give some advertisement in TV or radio to promote your website and this will sure help you to increase website publicity. But this may be a bit expensive so you must be careful about budgeting.

17. You can distribute pamphlets among those who could be the potential customer for you website products.

18. A good advertisement can be putting your website title and url on all the stuffs you use in daily life. This can be totally free advertisement but very much effective.

19. You can sponsor special events such as local sports tournaments or cultural programs and use your website banners to promote.

20. You can print stickers and put them on vehicles which will be a good source of advertisement for your website.

1. Permalinks are very much important for search engines and make sure you set up your permalink settings in an optimal way. Go to Settings -> Permalinks section in the wordpress admin panel and use “/%category%/%postname%/” so that your posts are ready for search engine friendly urls. This settings will make your post urls to show “http://www.your-blog.com/category/posttitle/” which is easier to remember and search engine friendly.

2. Use a SEO for wordpress plugin, for example All in One SEO Pack, to create custom title, keywords, description for your blog. This will make sure your blog has the perfect title, a good description and keywords for search engines to track.

3. Before making any post to your blog, always do some keyword research. You can use Wordtracker’s “Free Keyword Suggestion Tool” or similar tools to find long tail keywords phrases for your blog posts. Use these keywords in your blog post titles and also inside the post 2-3 times.

4. After submitting each post to your blog, make sure you bookmarked them to various popular social bookmarking sites, for example – DIGG, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc. to get some good high pr backlinks. There are some services, for example – OnlyWire, to help you to submit your post link to multiple social bookmarking sites with just one click.

5. Always make sure you have optimized your blog home page properly. Grab 2-3 major keyword phrases and some extra keywords which are related to your niche and put them in your site’s title, description and keyword section. This will get you more targeted visitors easily and will help you to get good search engine position fast.

6. Make sure you have a good sitemap for your blog which is sometimes essential for search engines to find all your blogs contents. You can use special plugins, for example – Google XML Sitemap Plugin, or create a sitemap and upload to your server, then link it to your blog.

7. Finally, don’t forget to get more backlinks for your blog through blog commenting, link exchanges etc. Always try to create backlinks related to your niche which will help you more than any general backlinks from any other niche. You can also do article submission to ezine sites, press releases, forum posting and directory submissions for quick backlinks.

Sitemap is one kind of map for the website and when your visitors are lost while browsing your site, they can easily locate the right location and navigate to what they are looking for. Lets say, your site has more than 10,000 pages and think how your visitors will find the correct information they are looking for. Only sitemaps can help them in this type of situations.

On a very huge site, visitors can easily find out a lot more information about your website with just one look over the sitemap. This saves their time and they will appreciate it more than anything.

A sitemap contains links to all pages in your site and therefore it helps you to optimize your site. The search engine robots can easily follow the links in the sitemap and craw every single page easily and fast. This is why, you must put a link to your sitemap on the home page of your site.

Finally sitemap’s will allow you to organize your site content and structure. Whenever you need to add a new content or page, you can easily find out where to link it or add it by just viewing the sitemap. This way you will get a perfectly organized site, no matter how huge your site is or how many pages it has.

So we can easily see that sitemap is very much important for your website and it keeps you helping in various ways to optimize, navigate, update and manage your website.

There can be various methods to do this and we are going to discuss two here. The first method is to use a background image but the disadvantage is its difficult to keep the image in the div’s center. Therefore when the div size is increased, the image doesn’t stay in the center.

HTML Code:

<div></div>

CSS Code:

.resizable {
background: url(image.jpg) -130px -140px no-repeat;
border: 3px double #fff;
float: left;
height: 12em;
margin: .2em 1em 1em 0;
width: 12em;
}

Second Method is to place the image inside the div in the HTML. This way you an put the image in the center of the div.
HTML Code:

<div><img src=”image.jpg” alt=”" /></div>

And the CSS:

.resizable {
border: 3px double #333;
float: left;
height: 12em;
margin: .2em 1em 1em 0;
overflow: hidden;
width: 12em;
}

.resizable img {
margin: -220px 0 0 -210px;
padding: 6em 0 0 6em;
}

That is a simple trick but very much handy. We hope it will help you in some web design project. Let us know if you found this trick useful and also if you found some better ways to improve this technique.

Clean and Simple Navigation

Try to keep the navigation simple and easy so that even newbie visitors can find whatever they are looking for. Beautifully designed flash banners or complex multi-level drop down navigation is not always needed. If the visitors do not find what they are looking for, they will leave your site. So better keep the navigation simple for everyone.

Indicating Where The User Is

Visitors will be browsing your site and after going a few page deep, they will want to make sure where they are browsing now. So design the site in such a way, that they can easily locate which part of the site they are in and also can navigate wherever they want to go.

Remove Splash Pages

Splash pages are no longer useful or needed. Actually they are very old technology. A splash page is something that shows up when a visitor first visits your site and it says “Welcome” or something similar. They can be beautiful but actually of no real purpose. Its always a good approach to show them the vital content of your site at the first look and do not spend their valuable time on splash pages.

Use Minimal Banner Advertisement

To many banner advertisements won’t do any good or won’t increase your site revenue. Rather you should emphasize on more valuable content and put your affiliate links inside your content. It will make your visitors feel that they are willingly clicking the affiliate links rather than they are being pushed to click or buy.

Avoid Audio

While the visitors are browsing your site content, you shouldn’t distract them with some looping audio which will just make them annoyed. If you have to use some audio, make sure your visitors can play, pause or stop it and also can control the volume level as they like.